The present invention relates generally to remote-controlled price display systems in stores.
On the shelves of a site such as a supermarket, hypermarket, or other retail outlet (for example pharmacies, etc.), an essential object of such systems is to present consumers with a price for each article on sale, with that price being known to correspond reliably to the price that appears in the central file of the store, i.e. with the actual price that will be charged for the article at the checkout.
Another object of those prior art systems is to enable price changes to be made automatically in much shorter times than with a manual display, whether this is for particular promotional periods in the store, for all or some of the articles, to implement price changes, to deal with inflation when prices have to be increased very frequently, etc.
Moreover, price display is subject to many constraints, in particular legal constraints, as to the nature of the prices displayed (unit price, promotional price, price in Euros, etc.), with which constraints electronic systems must conform in exactly the same way as displays on paper.
Accordingly, although electronic label systems are tending to become more and more sophisticated as time goes on, they nevertheless remain relatively rigid in terms of display facilities and the organization thereof over time.
The present invention aims to alleviate those drawbacks of the prior art and to propose an electronic label system that offers a vast range of display facilities, in particular to meet to the constraints referred to above and to satisfy an increasing demand from users to modify displayed prices often and for short periods, which system can act extremely flexibly and quickly to display information other than prices, for example information relating to the products and/or to the labels themselves, and which also offers the facility of modifying all the labels of a given group or all the labels throughout the store in accordance with precise time periods that are accurately specified in terms of when they begin and/or their duration.